عنوان

A relational view of women's use of the internet :

Number

TLets809569

Title Proper

A relational view of women's use of the internet :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Madden, Louise

Title Proper by Another Author

exploring bodies, space and objects

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Cardiff University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2012

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Text preceding or following the note

2012

Text of Note

This thesis reports on a research project investigating how women use the internet, and how this use is productive of femininity. It takes an approach to researching this technology that examines what it becomes when it is used, and looks in depth at this internet use in a small number of women's lives. Diaries, online and offline interviews, photographs and participation online were used to investigate their use of and experience of the internet, to investigate what is particular about women's use. The project attempted to think differently about the internet, to use a relational approach, influenced by phenomenology and home geography to argue that in order to understand the internet we need to consider embodied practices and the objects and movements that make it possible. The entity of the internet emerges in a range of modalities, with human, non-human, material and semiotic components in a constantly shifting ecology of relations, many of these gendered. It is not a simple or discrete entity. This means it can operate in the lives of women in very diverse ways, from a formal setting oriented to work, to a purely leisure uses, mediated through rooms, posture, expertise and affect.

H Social Sciences (General); HM Sociology

Cardiff University

Cardiff University

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y